Wednesday, November 13, 2024 →
I am made to understand that it is stylistically incorrect to underline hyperlinks, but, with apologies to my typographical betters, it is hypertextually incorrect to do otherwise. An underlined link is rarely a detriment; its absence often is.
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
So-called “server-side rendering” is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, and then client-side rendering”, in contrast to “client-side rendering” which is actually “server-side serializing, network streaming, manipulation by JavaScript, and then client-side rendering”. By this logic, programs that can be built with only a C compiler use “server-side compilation”, while programs that require Make or GNU Autotools use “client-side compilation”.
In the cloud, you must pay the piper, who, one must always remember, charges more than you’d expect for egress
Last night at Lazarus
Finally, the web is taking cues from the best UX in the world (PBX phone trees)
(to be clear you have to type “1” or “2” in the little box and then click the button with your mouse)
I miss Twitter bots. Wish fediverse hosting was easier… not sure I care to be manually approved for botsin.space 🙄 or for that matter to register a new account on any hosted server for every silly bot idea I can think of. It should be as easy as RSS.
I cannot abide the hideous portmanteau “transpile”, sewn together as it is from two words which would perfectly convey the intent in every single case, created intentionally as a distinction without a difference.
There’s nothing important left unsaid because it’s too hard to write online. Nothing wrong with it being even easier, but for decades it’s been the moral equivalent of single-cent bid/ask spreads.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Enjoying the alternatives to human intelligence brought to us by the Alt Man
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 →
The reason it’s hard to draw a line in the sand to determine the line for “true” artificial intelligence is not because it’s hard to recognize intelligence, but because it is hard to know ourselves. “What will it feel like when …?” sounds easy but is actually fortune telling.
I wish my podcast player did automatic text transcription - even a bad LLM would be okay, and even paying a cloud LLM per request would be ok. I also wish it let me mark a timestamp as important so I could go back and find it later.
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Like everyone, I have my own code formatting opinions. Whenever the urge to share them gets too great, I try to keep in mind the senior architect from many jobs ago who believed that the best tab width was 3. I suspect that some state education agencies still run scripts indented to three spaces.
Made a mezcal old fashioned (mezcal, orange bitters, Agave syrup) again, but added a pinch of salt for the first time tonight. Deliciousness metric improved ~30%.
Stuff like this makes me want to make my own game. Something cool about not sending a link but physically carrying around or handing someone a thing you made. Perhaps not a game ruthlessly optimized for fun, but a game-like experience designed to be enjoyed in a few moments.
Recently reminded of the Trent Reznor Prize For Tricky Embedding, for which nominations continue into the 2020s.
Friday, August 2, 2024
I am somewhat dissatisfied with the comments server on my main website, and have been hunting for alternatives. The most cursed thing I’ve seen so far is this:
I implemented static HTML comments on my website by tail’ing the /var/logs/nginx/access.log with a perl script. No CGI, no database, just the actual text of the comments stored as a single comment per line in a .html file.
To comment a visitor takes any url on the domain and appends “/@say/”. Like notmyurl.com/somepage…. response to somepage. Or “…lakephoto.jpg/@say/Cool fish! How long was it?”
The perl script sees the /@say/ in the logs and adds the parsed out and sanitized comment to an .html file. There’s some nginx location hijinks for matching /@say/ URLs that goes to a confirmation page and redirects to the comment listing page.
…
I’ve used this comment system on my tor onion services sites for the last decade. I get plenty of people trying to exploit it. It’s kind of fun. If the Tor folk haven’t pwned it I doubt the HN folk will. Not for lack of skill but mostly a lack of motivation relative to the tor folk.
I do not plan to do this but I also do not plan to avoid doing this, should the opportunity arise.
I learned in the reflector.show episodes about the Young Thug trial that a televangelist in the 80s said that “music is the new pornography”, and for a second I understood why one might call one’s band “The New Pornographers”, but no, it actually makes as much sense as I originally thought (none).
Saturday, June 29, 2024
How to install programs with homebrew:
brew search PROGRAM and wait for it to show resultsI see how one might believe that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and I see how one might believe that the “spirit of the law” is a coherent concept that everyone understands, but I have to say I don’t see how one could believe both at once.
TIL that “lorem ipsum” is the corruption of pain itself.
Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words themselves are a truncation of dolorem ipsum (“pain itself”).